REMINDER: Re: HEADS UP: network stack and socket hackery over the next few weeks

On Fri, 17 Mar 2006, Robert Watson wrote:

> Over the next few weeks, I'll be doing a fairly serious workworking of the 
> socket and protocol reference models, in order to clean up a number of 
> long-standing race conditions and provide infrastructure for significant 
> locking optimizations for several protocols (including TCP).  This is high 
> risk work, in that this part of the socket code is very complex and there 
> are a great many subtleties.  Part of the goal of the work is to eliminate 
> some of this complexity, and make the subtle a bit more obvious (and 
> documented), so I think it's all for the good in the long term.  However, it 
> will likely introduce significant instability in the short term, especially 
> in the TCP code where there will be substantial changes in the memory 
> management model.
>
> I've started merging minor parts of the patch over the last few days, but 
> things will get serious around April 1 when the deadline for maintenance on 
> the netatm stack expires (see arch_at_ and net_at_ posts about this), allowing me 
> to bring in changes that are not known to work with netatm.  As such, be 
> warned that things may get a bit messy!

As a reminder, April 1 is now three days away.  On April 1, I will be 
committed an extensive set of socket and netinet changes which will likely 
render the network stack broken.  I say this with some confidence because I 
have tested the changes fairly extensively, as have a number of other 
developers, and they appear to mostly work.  Therefore, they will be broken 
:-).  I will be posting updated versions of these patches shortly, but unless 
we run into show-stopper serious instability with them, rather than nits, I 
will commit them (in their updated form) on April 1 shortly after the netatm 
build is disabled.

I will post another HEADS UP as the changes go into the tree, and will be 
monitoring things closely to try and get any bugs that might turn up fixed as 
quickly as possible.  As an FYI, I will be travelling the weeks of April 6 - 
April 21, but will be online frequently, and working for several days in the 
Bay Area during the trip.  Please report bugs relating to this work to 
current_at_.

Robert N M Watson